Rus’ as a Target of the Crusades: History and Historical Memory

Abstract

The military conflicts between Rus’ian Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Catholic powers in the thirteenth century are commonly associated with crusading activities in the Baltic region. Yet it is striking that, although some crusader conquests of pagan territories extended into Rus’ian territories (e.g. in Novgorod and Polotsk Land), no contemporary sources include any declaration or justification of an explicitly anti-Rus’ian crusade at this time. In fact, the first clearly anti-Orthodox and anti-Rus’ian crusade in the region was the expedition of King Magnus of Sweden against Novgorod in 1348–1350. It was only in the fifteenth century when Rus’ian schismatics began to be considered as the main enemy of Catholic Christendom in the region. Simultaneously, the increasing authority of Muscovy began to pose a real threat to its western neighbours, namely Sweden in the north and Poland and Lithuania in the south. Indeed, it was early modern national history-writing that emphasised the crusading aspects of conflicts between the Rus’ and Catholics in the Middle Ages, depicting them as long-standing religious and cultural wars. That tradition was then confirmed and expanded by the professional historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Keywords

The research was supported by University of Tartu Grant no. PHVAJ22905. I am grateful to Kari and Ülle Tarkiainen for their kind help.

Crusading against Rus’ in Historiography and Historical Memory

Has there ever been a crusade against Orthodox Rus’?¹ In Sergei Eisenstein’s renowned film Alexander Nevsky (1938), a Catholic priest blesses the throwing of living Russian children into a bonfire in conquered Pskov. In the scene depicted in Henryk Siemiradzki’s often reproduced painting Alexander Nevsky Receiving Papal Legates in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow (1876–1877, destroyed), which is related to the Vita of the canonised prince, Alexander Nevsky rejects a papal offer of cooperation. The popular and propagandistic picture of the irreconcilable conflict between the prince and the pope, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Russia and Europe, East and West has shaped an understanding of Rus’² as a significant target of the thirteenth–century Northern Crusades, with its central event being Alexander Nevsky’s victory against the Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice of Lake Peipus in 1242.³

Actually, the Polish painter Siemiradzki was Catholic, and the film by the Soviet director Eisenstein reveals its blatant anti-German topicality—even the mitre of the Catholic movie-bishop is decorated with swastikas. In the writings about medieval Livonian history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the topic of the medieval wars in the Baltic as crusades was generally relegated to the background and overshadowed, while the national and economic motifs for the medieval conquests and conflicts were emphasised instead.⁴ On the other hand, in Russian historiography, the thesis of a carefully planned crusade against the Rus’ directed by the pope during the Middle Ages has been a main theme presented by Russian authors.⁵

However, even in Russian history-writing, the thesis of the thirteenth-century crusade being directed against Russia is rather recent, and dates back only to the mid-twentieth century. In a few cases the nineteenth-century Russian historians used the term “the crusade against Rus’” and/or described the pope as the instigator of a war against Russia.⁶ Nevertheless, in these cases, the military clashes on the Novgorod and Pskov borders were not seen as clashes between “civilisations,” or as centrally organised aggression directed against Russia. The development of the latter thesis occurred within a clear contemporary political context—World War II.

In 1940–1941, a young Leningrad historian named Igor Shaskolskii (1918–1995) published several popular articles in which he wrote about the historical aggression on the part of Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic countries against Russia.⁷ The background for this was the Soviet war against Finland in 1939–1940,⁸ the occupation of the Baltic countries by the Soviet Union in 1940, and the war between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941–1945. Soon after the war, in 1951, Shaskolskii published an article significantly titled “The Papal Curia—the Main Organiser of the Crusades Against the Rus’ in 1240–1242.”⁹ The important thesis proposed in the article is that Livonia could not have been the actual objective of the Baltic Crusades: “It is very likely that the decision by Rome to pay so much attention to Livonia and Finland was not motivated purely by its interest in the subjugation of these poor northerly countries with their backward populations to the Catholic Church. Instead, very early on, the Papal See apparently started to view Livonia and Finland as the staging ground for the future attack on the vast and rich Russian lands.”¹⁰

Actually, the latter argument originally came from the Finnish historian Gustav Adolf Donner (1902–1940), as already noted by several researchers.¹¹ The medievalist Donner came from a family of Finnish-Swedish intellectuals and entrepreneurs. He received his PhD from the University of Helsinki and was killed during the Winter War defending his country against Soviet Russian aggression. His most influential work was a monograph about the activities of the papal legate William of Modena in the Baltic Sea area in the 1220s and 1230s, in which William is seen as the organiser of the crusade against Novgorod.¹² Nevertheless, in his article, Shaskolskii sharply reviled Donner, as well as another Finnish historian Jalmari Jaakkola (1885–1964) and the German Jesuit scholar Albert Maria Ammann (1892–1974),¹³ from whom he also borrowed many ideas. Of course, it should be understood that in the Soviet Union during the 1950s, it was impossible to quote foreign “bourgeois” authors in historical articles without strongly criticising them.¹⁴

Donner was also the main source for the book The Papacy and Rus’ in the Tenth to Fifteenth Century (1959) by Boris Ramm (1902–1989), another Soviet author. Ramm treated Livonian territory as part of the medieval Rus’ state,¹⁵ and therefore, he saw the crusading conquest of the Baltic as “crusading” aggression against Rus’.¹⁶ Vladimir Pashuto (1918–1983), a Moscow-based historian, adhered to this way of thinking as well. His article “The Policy of the Papal Curia Towards the Rus’ in the Thirteenth Century,”¹⁷ which was published in 1949, was replete with derisive Soviet-style political polemics primarily against Ammann, although Pashuto actually borrowed the general picture of the pope’s leading role in the relations between Rus’ and Latin Europe from the latter. In his article, Pashuto also adapted to the Soviet history-writing the thesis that Prince Alexander Nevsky, by surrendering to the Mongols and waging war with “the West,” saved Russia, because the crusaders (and not the Mongols) posed the real threat to the existence of the Russian people, culture, and religion [!].¹⁸ This thesis was originally formulated in 1925 by the Russian émigré historian George Vernadsky (1887–1973),¹⁹ whose religious esoterica was, at the same time, sharply criticised by Pashuto. Later, Pashuto would also draw a clear connection between the Mediterranean and Baltic Crusades and view the latter as “reactionary” and “feudal” anti-Russian aggression led by the popes (Map 11.1).²⁰

Map 11.1

The Eastern Baltic in the thirteenth century

However, the Russian authors used the term krestonoscy, krestonosnyi in a vaguely defined way in the context of Baltic history. In Russian, the word krestonosec is ambiguous: literally it means “cross bearer,” but it originally meant “marked with a cross,” “Christian evangelist,” or “cross carrier.”²¹ However, since the eighteenth century, it has been used to refer to the crusaders, as well as the Teutonic Knights.²² The latter meaning has been significantly influenced by the relevant Polish-language term Krzyżacy. In the writing of Polish national history, there has been a strong tendency to demonise the Teutonic Order, which, in turn, fitted well the black-and-white Soviet view.²³ Therefore, the frequently used expression krestonosnaia agressiia can be understood, depending on the context, as “crusading aggression” or “Teutonic aggression.” The common use of the term “crusading aggression” in Soviet-era historical writing was perhaps instrumental in the idea of the “primeval German enemy” being replaced by the “primeval Western enemy” in Soviet propaganda during the Cold War era, when, after the East German state was established, the incitement of hate against the Germans was modulated. For the Middle Ages, it was the pope who qualified as the leader of the abstract force called “the West.”²⁴ A “crusade” continued to be seen as a cover for the criminal desire of the Germans to expand to the East (Drang nach Osten). The Soviet historians also declared that they were relying on the authority of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which was actually untrue: in their writings, Marx and Engels had tended to see the German expansion in medieval Eastern Europe in a positive light.²⁵

An excellent summary of this concept, which was formulated around 1950, is provided in a Stalinist-era book about Estonian history (1952): “Bloody and ruthless aggression was conducted under the flag of the “crusades.” The aggressive Catholic Church, headed by the Roman pope, increasingly started to turn its attention to forcibly and coercively converting the people in the Baltic countries to Christianity. The enslavement of these peoples meant increasing the number of taxable persons […]. However, the pope was also interested in the Baltic countries in order to conduct an invasion of Russia […]. With the invasion of the Baltic countries by the rapacious conquerors, this area immediately became the most important link in the system of anti-Russian scheming.”²⁶ This also reflects the Hegelian idea of “nations without history,” whereby the people of the Baltic countries or Finland that were Russia’s neighbours were not independently important.²⁷

Consequently, the paradox is that the hypothesis of the thirteenth-century anti-Rus’ crusade was originally predominantly based on Finnish historical writing.²⁸ The three Christian military campaigns in Finland and Karelia around 1150, in 1238/39 or 1249,²⁹ and in 1293 were already viewed as significant milestones in Finnish history by authors of the sixteenth century.³⁰ However, the historicity of the first expedition, or at least its connection to the ideology of the crusades, had actually been questioned.³¹ The Finnish scholar Gabriel Rein (1800–1867), who combined medieval Latin and Rus’ sources, tied these events to the Russian medieval history and started to depict Finland as an area of competition between the Western World and Russia.³² This research tradition was developed very forcefully by Jalmari Jaakkola, a visionary historian who, wishing to demonstrate Finland’s historical role in world politics,³³ saw Finland as a “crusade province”—a battlefield between the East and the West.³⁴

Shaskolskii adopted this tradition. However, since he considered Karelia and partly also Finland as part of Novgorod, or at least as dependent on Novgorod, then the Swedish crusades to Finland and Karelia became anti-Russian for him.³⁵ Shaskolskii combined the justified criticism of Jaakkola’s “Fenno-centricity” and some other ideas, with an even stronger “Russo-centricity.” Shaskolskii often used quotation marks around the term “crusade” in order to emphasise its deceptive nature. He understood the term to mean a rapacious conquest conducted with the pope’s support and under the pretext of conversion to Latin Christianity.³⁶ In his writings he placed emphasis on the allegedly anti-Russian aggression of Sweden,³⁷ as well as the unconditionally legitimate attempts by Russia to defend its access to the Baltic Sea.³⁸ The political idea that Russia needs seas and harbours for its existence actually was born only during the reign of Peter I (1682–1725);³⁹ in this case it just became projected onto the past.

In the context of Livonian history, the Soviet authors also based their assumptions on the idea that before the crusades, Estonia and Latvia were, to a greater or lesser degree, under the control of Rus’. The central event in this region during the mid-thirteenth century was seen to be the halting of Teutonic aggression on the Rus’ border with the victory in the Battle on the Ice in 1242. The role of Alexander Nevsky as the saint and national hero in these events has always overshadowed the battle between the Rus’ and Livonian forces near Rakvere in 1268, although the latter was militarily and politically more significant. In Western literature, the classic history of the crusades edited by Kenneth Setton (1914–1995) says the following: “the union of the Livonian Brothers with the Teutonic Knights had given great impetus to the plans for expansion against the Russian principalities […]. This eastward expansion against Novgorod had been cut short, however, when Alexander Nevsky of Suzdal […] on 5 April 1242, had limited any further expansion in this direction.”⁴⁰ Remarkably, this is countered by the traditional Baltic viewpoint in another volume of the same work, which defined the aggressive side in a totally different way: the Teutonic Order in Prussia and Livonia constituted “a German and Catholic bulwark against Russian and Greek Orthodox expansion in the Baltic region.”⁴¹

The presentation of Rus’ as a crusade target in the thirteenth century remains common in popular and general perceptions of history.⁴² At the same time, the scholarly research of the last decades has significantly moved towards a subtly nuanced understanding of the topic. The turn started in the 1990s already and was connected to the growing influence of the “pluralist” approach⁴³ in the research of the Northern Crusades,⁴⁴ and rethinking of the established ideological patterns in Russian history-writing.⁴⁵ Remarkably, in the last case, the political developments especially after c.2010 have caused sometimes even irate discussions against historians there, where “patriots” accuse academics of de-heroization of Russian history and claim that “the West” has always aimed to conquer and destroy Russia and Russian Orthodoxy from the Middle Ages on.⁴⁶

The Actual Crusades

The medieval sources provide a multi-faceted picture of the potentially anti-Rus’ crusades in the Baltic. A significant question in this context related to the history of the Northern Crusades and with no clear answer is: when did the relations between the Latin and Orthodox Churches in northern and eastern Europe start to be treated as a religious conflict?⁴⁷ Actually, in the Mediterranean, the picture was also much more nuanced and ambivalent than it appeared at first glance. The differences that had developed between the Greek and Latin churches over the centuries were correlated with political confrontations, but they also contrasted with the hopes about political cooperation.⁴⁸ In the early thirteenth century, the Latin Church did not consider it necessary to send missionaries to proselytise among the Greeks, because they were already Christians (although with faults).⁴⁹ The same applied to the Rus’ians: the issue was schism not heresy. And although the canonists justified crusading against schismatics,⁵⁰ at that time, this was related to the Balkans and the defence of the Latin Empire.⁵¹ There is also no indication that this theory would have been generally known in northern Europe around 1200, as even in the eastern Mediterranean it became topical only after 1204. In the twelfth century, Scandinavian-Rus’ian contact still existed even in the field of religious worship.⁵² For comparison, the idea of crusades or the theology of indulgences never developed in the Orthodox Church. However, even in the Eastern Churches, there was an understanding that some wars are waged for sacred purposes and for the glory of God.⁵³ However, there is no information on any reflections of this ideology in connection with the Baltic between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The general honouring of Alexander Nevsky as a saint did not start until the fifteenth or even sixteenth century in Rus’,⁵⁴ and the famous, spectacular elements of the Battle on Ice, such as the ice breaking under the weight of the knights, were promoted only by the Eisenstein film, and are based on post-medieval interpretations and not contemporary sources.⁵⁵

The thirteenth-century chronicles of the Baltic Crusades do mention the religious errors of the Orthodox Rus’ians, but do not place them outside of Christendom.⁵⁶ The crusaders not only sporadically collided with the Rus’ians, but also regularly cooperated with them. However, the expedition from Estonia into the Votic Land starting in 1240 did result in actual territorial conflict with Novgorod. Nevertheless, this war was not legitimised by the schism of the Rus’ians but by the paganism of the Votes and other Finnic tribes in this region. In the thirteenth century, cities developed in Livonia, for which the trade with Rus’ was of vital importance, and which attracted not only German but also Rus’ian immigrants.⁵⁷ The origins of the 1242 Battle on Ice story extend back to the cooperation between the Catholic bishop of Tartu and the local anti-Suzdal opposition in Rus’ian Pskov in the 1230s. Furthermore, the Battle of Rakvere in 1268 probably resulted in the Livonians abandoning their attempts to seize power in the territories east of the Narva River claimed and/or controlled by Novgorod, thereby establishing the basis for “peaceful coexistence,” confirmed by peace treaty in 1268 or 1269.⁵⁸ The next war between Livonia and Novgorod did not break out until the 1440s. In Livonian and Prussian political argumentation, the Rus’ did appear as the enemies of Christendom, especially starting in the second half of the thirteenth century, but as rule, not as an independent force but as subjects of the “Tatars” or Lithuanian “pagans.”⁵⁹ The extensive expansion of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania starting around 1250 resulted in the majority of the Grand Dukes’ subjects being Orthodox residents of Rus’. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the princes of Western Rus’ did participate as subordinates in the Mongol military campaigns in Poland and Hungary—but they sometimes also used the Mongol units in their own political interests.⁶⁰ A good example of the multi-faceted nature of these relations is the letter written by King Władysław I of Poland to the pope in 1323 in which he notifies the pontiff of the death of the Rus’ian princes, Leo and Andrew of Galicia, and calls them de gente schismatica. However, he also refers to them in an absolutely positive way as the protectors of Poland against the Mongols, and asks the pope for permission to preach a crusade to protect Rus’.⁶¹

Karelia, on the border between the Swedish kingdom and Novgorod, was another region where actual clashes occurred between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds.⁶² In the second half of the fifteenth century, these limited local conflicts were ideologically connected to the cult of King Eric the Holy (d.1160), and Bishop Saint Henry (12th c.), the holy patrons of Sweden and Finland, who, thereby became the defenders of the Christians against the pagans and Rus’ians in these lands. Although the crusading aspects of these legends were fictional to a great degree and do not reflect the reality of the twelfth century, their new role was used to create a mental connection between the border conflicts and the crusade.⁶³ Scandinavian forces had already organised many expeditions into Karelia and to the Neva River before the thirteenth century. The Novgorod sphere of influence in fact extended to this area.⁶⁴ The issue is whether and when these expeditions started to be treated as a crusade against Rus’—most probably this happened only at the end of the Middle Ages.⁶⁵ It was not until the turn of the fourteenth century that the translations of romances and chansons de geste reached Sweden, thereby paving the way for the equation of schismatic Rus’ians with the Saracens.⁶⁶ This development is evident in The Chronicle of Duke Erik, the anonymous verse chronicle written between 1320 and 1332.⁶⁷ One of the most important themes of the chronicle is the competition for control with the Novgorod Rus’ians in Karelia and Ingria around 1300, in light of which the conflict with Rus’ was projected back to the twelfth century by the author of the chronicle.⁶⁸

The actual crusade by King Magnus Eriksson of Sweden against Novgorod did not start until 1348. Having arrived on the Karelian coast with his fleet, the king sent Novgorod a proposal to have a religious debate. After this proposal was rejected, the Swedes started to baptise the heathen people around the Neva River, which in reality meant their subjugation and taxation. In August, the Nöteborg fortress, which controlled the head of the Neva River and therefore all shipping between Novgorod and the Baltic Sea, was captured. After Magnus had returned home, the Novgorodians recaptured the castle after a lengthy siege in February 1349. In 1350, Magnus undertook a new campaign, which was rebuffed and the king’s fleet was largely destroyed in a storm. On the one hand, Magnus’s crusade continued the long-term trend of the Swedish crown strengthening its control over Karelia. At the same time, it was related to the mystical and impractical instructions of St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303–1373), who had suggested to take along the priests and monks of several religious orders who could instruct the heathens in the Christian faith. After this failed, Magnus fell out of Birgitta’s favour for having discontinued his crusade due to the great problems of provisioning the royal army. However, these reproaches date from a time when Birgitta had already left Sweden and started supporting Magnus’ domestic opponents.⁶⁹

Except for the episode related to Magnus’ expedition, the sources from the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century in Livonia and Sweden occasionally use the danger and schismatic proximity of Rus’ or Orthodoxy as an argument in litigations in the papal curia for proving, for instance, that one party or another requires support against its Catholic rivals.⁷⁰ However, as a rule, the “schismatics” were still in second place as targets, after the “infidels” (in the Livonian and Prussian context, the term predominantly means the pagan Lithuanians) against whom the Teutonic Order continued to regularly organise crusading expeditions with the participation of knights from Western Europe until the 1410s.⁷¹ Teutonic diplomacy for a period did not recognise the Christianisation of Lithuania even after Grand Duke Jogaila was baptised and became the crowned head of Catholic Poland as King Władysław II (1386), and claimed that the Order still needed the help of West-European crusaders to fight the “Lithuanians, Rus’ians and other infidels.”⁷²

The situation changed significantly in the mid-fifteenth century.⁷³ After the conversion of Lithuania and Samogitia between 1387 and 1413, the Teutonic Order suffered a deficit of legitimation: there were no pagans to battle any more. This was vividly demonstrated already during the Council of Constance (1414–1418) where the Order had trouble defending its right of existence in the Baltic against Polish claims. The argument of the historical and continuous role the Teutonic Knights played in the baptism of pagans and in the defence of Christianity against heathens was not fit for purpose anymore.⁷⁴ In the 1430s, Polish and Teutonic diplomacy blamed each other for co-operating with Rus’ian schismatics, Tatar pagans, Turks, and Bohemian heretics.⁷⁵ At that time, especially in Livonia, the “pagan danger” as a political-rhetorical argument was gradually being replaced by the “Russian danger.” One of the turning points in this regard was the war between the Teutonic Order and Novgorod between 1443 and 1448. It was initiated by Count Gerhard of Mark (1378–1461) as a personal feud, which in reality was carried out by the Order in Livonia.⁷⁶ The military failures of the Order resulted in assistance having to be sought from outside, for which the vocabulary of the crusade and arguments related to the schism of the Rus’ians were actively employed both in Livonia and in Prussia.⁷⁷ In the correspondence aimed for audiences outside the Baltic region, Rus’ians were repeatedly listed alongside Tatars and Turks.⁷⁸ In addition, it was in Novgorod that the Florentine Union (1439) between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches was first, and most decisively, rejected in Rus’.⁷⁹ This issue could be an additional reason why the anti-Novgorod rhetoric of the 1440s explicitly stressed the schismatic nature of its people. In any case, besides the purely political context, the theological side of the question was known in fifteenth-century Livonia: at least in Riga there were manuscripts available containing medieval anti-Greek theological polemic.⁸⁰

Everyday life in on the eastern border of Livonia continued largely unchanged at the same time. As a rule, the sporadic border conflicts and wars, especially with Pskov along a frontier that was c. 480 kilometres long and included several difficult to define sections in the wilderness, were not accompanied by religious arguments.⁸¹ The main exception was the conflict in the Pskov-Livonian frontier territory called Purnau, which the Livonian Teutonic Order made special use of around 1480 by equating the need to repel the Rus’ian danger with its own aspirations for diplomatic and military hegemony within Livonia.⁸² In 1480 the Order initiated the war against Pskov. Its reason lay mainly in the internal politics of Livonia where the Order attempted to expand its hegemony over bishops, but the outcome was the Russian counterattack in 1481 devastating inland Livonia for the first time since the 1220s. The extreme Russian or schismatic violence became a frequent topic in descriptions of this war.⁸³

An embargo on arms trade, which was repeatedly declared against the pagans, was another element of crusading legislation used in the Baltic from the thirteenth century onwards. In this regard, around 1300, the Swedish king integrated this regulation into his secular legislation as an anti-Rus’ian tool in the competition in Karelia,⁸⁴ and in the early sixteenth century, the Livonian territorial lords also started to demand the compliance with this embargo, often in opposition to the trade interests of the local towns.⁸⁵ The medieval context of the embargo still remained a predominantly ecclesiastical one. In 1428, the provincial synod in Riga expanded the—originally papal—arms embargo against Jews and Saracens to also include the Rus’ians (ac perfidis Ruthenis).⁸⁶ When, in the course of the internal conflicts in Livonia, the archbishop of Riga in 1477 placed the city of Riga and the Livonian Teutonic Order under interdict, this decision may even have included a general accusation regarding trading with infidels, because the diplomatic countermeasures employed by the town at the Roman Curia in 1478–1479 resulted in a special papal authorisation for trading with schismatics, the only exception being arms trading.⁸⁷

The increasing power of the Grand Princes of Moscow and the elimination of Novgorod’s (1478) and Pskov’s (1510) independence by Ivan III and Vasili III meant a cardinal change in the political relations of the region and a real threat for Livonia. This change was also accompanied by the increasingly intensive use of the argument related to dangerous schismatic neighbours promoted by all the territorial lords of Livonia, as well as the Prussian Teutonic Order and Scandinavian leaders.⁸⁸ At the same time, the struggle with the Turks was at the centre of papal politics, and this sporadically involved a plan to recruit the grand prince of Moscow as an active ally against the Ottoman Empire—and also force him to recognise papal primacy.⁸⁹ In the diplomacy of the Baltic Sea region, the Russians (or Muscovites) were ever more actively presented as equal enemies with the Turks and similar imagery was used when speaking about them. It was especially Polish-Lithuanian diplomacy that stressed the fact that the Russians posed a threat to Christianity equal to that of the Turks.⁹⁰ The background for this was the actual and continuous Russian-Lithuanian War that started in the 1480s. Teutonic diplomacy used the argument of the schismatic neighbours, in order to avoid actually participating in a war with the Turks. These circumstances created favourable conditions for applying for crusade indulgences for Livonia or Scandinavia,⁹¹ which were already discussed around 1480.⁹² However, the grant of indulgences to benefit Livonia took place only in two campaigns from 1503 to 1506 and 1507 to 1510,⁹³ after the Russian-Livonian Wars of 1480–1481 and 1501–1502, and the Russian-Swedish War of 1494–1497 were already over. In the 1500s the Teutonic Order also made unsuccessful attempts to use for its own needs the money raised from indulgences against Ottomans.⁹⁴ In 1505, King Alexander of Poland received a cruciata for two years, which, among other places, should have been preached in Livonia and Scandinavia against the Turks, Tatars, schismatics, and “other sects.”⁹⁵ The results of two anti-Russian⁹⁶ indulgence campaigns in Germany were assessed as being monetarily successful, but it is not known how the Teutonic Order actually used this amount. The pope promised another indulgence preaching campaign for Livonia and Prussia in 1514–1515, which however the Teutonic Order did not put into effect. Leo X in 1514 also supported the restoration of churches in the bishopric of Tartu destroyed by Russians and the defence of the territory against Russians with a local indulgence.⁹⁷

Conclusion

The image of the Russians as the historical and primeval enemy of the Baltic countries and Scandinavia became fixed in connection with Muscovy’s wars against Livonia, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania in the 1550s.⁹⁸ Starting from the eighteenth century, the medieval wars were increasingly seen as a modern battle for Russian maritime trading interests. In Finland, as well as in the Baltic countries, “the Russian threat can often be called upon as the cause of an event, whether or not they were in fact able to present such a threat at the time.”⁹⁹ Alexander Nevsky’s role in repelling Western aggression is quite widely accepted in historical writing, both inside and outside of Russia.¹⁰⁰ The idea, that the Catholic Church planned an aggressive policy against Rus’ especially in the 1230s and 1240s, shaped primarily by Gustav Adolf Donner, has found its way into standard English-language textbooks.¹⁰¹ The paradox is that in the thirteenth century, in the heyday of crusading in the Baltic, there was no crusade campaign which could be called explicitly anti-Rus’ian or anti-Orthodox. The proposition that Rus’/Russia and Europe are two totally different, conflicting entities was born only in modern times.¹⁰² Only then did the medieval Baltic crusades gradually start to be reinterpreted as primarily aimed against Rus’. However, the memorialisation of the thirteenth-century history, especially in modern Russia, continues to reproduce the story of Catholic “westerners” who planned the crusade with the aim to conquer the Rus’ and subjugate the Orthodox religion.